


But now must I sink

by athousandwinds



Category: Eight Days of Luke - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-01
Updated: 2010-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ragnarok.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But now must I sink

David woke with the dawn, much to his annoyance. He had been dreaming – of what, he didn't feel like telling anyone – and the scream of the cock had made him shudder awake, barely conscious of himself. It kept echoing in his head and David tried to pressure it out, cupping his ears and releasing them, but all he ended up with was earache.

He went downstairs and was surprised to find Astrid already in the kitchen, sitting in her dressing gown and watching the kettle boil. "Did – " he began to ask, and Astrid's response was slow; she shook her head first as if to get rid of water in her ears.

"Yes, I heard it, too," she said, and with a cross glance at the malingering kettle she found her cigarettes in the pocket of her robe and lit one up. "Next year, let's go somewhere without chickens."

David laughed a bit even though it wasn't all that funny, to show that he wasn't in a grumpy mood with her about it. Astrid sighed and then the kettle began to whistle.

"You might as well go for a walk, if you're up," she said. "I'll make breakfast for both of us."

David nodded and went to put on his coat over his pyjamas. Breakfast cooked by Astrid meant crunchy eggs and greasy sausages, but she worried so much about it that he didn't mind. When they were at home they had cereal, but Astrid had decided that a holiday in the country meant she should try and cook a full English breakfast as part of proper parenting, only of course they didn't call it a full English breakfast because they were in Wales.

It had rained the night before and David trudged across the fields, the mud sucking at his wellies. At home, the weatherman had said, the sun was shining. David felt that this was unfair, though ultimately probably not Chepstow's fault as such. Once he nearly forgot to close a gate behind him, and lost a welly trying to hurry back. It seemed like wasted effort, since the only livestock he could see were white specks in the distance, but he had no desire to get glared at by Mr Price, who owned the farm nearest their cottage.

This was as well, as it turned out, for the sheep were closer than he'd thought. He heard the music before he knew what it was, like the cockcrow. The shepherd – David hadn't really thought there were shepherds any more, but maybe they just didn't have a union or anything – the shepherd was sitting up against a tree, his legs widespread and a harp between them. His eyes were closed and he was playing a tune that David didn't know, something old, perhaps. Folk music.

"Isn't that a bit – " David started, and then closed his mouth. Presumably some Welsh people really did go about playing the harp and minding sheep, only he hadn't thought they'd do both at the same time. Weren't harps expensive? It was awfully muddy here.

"I know," said the shepherd. Under his fingers, the strings shivered music. "But I'm supposed to be playing a harp, and so I shall."

"Do the sheep like it?" David asked tentatively.

"They're sheep," said the shepherd, and his accent wasn't local at all. David wasn't even sure it was Welsh. "They've been listening to it for two thousand years, they're probably used to it."

Oh. He was one of Luke's friends. David tried not to feel stupid, and failed.

"I'm Evan," said the shepherd, only it didn't quite sound like Evan; there was another name beneath it in a different language entirely, one that thrummed and deepened with something that wasn't words at all.

"I'm David," he said. Evan nodded, as if he'd known this fact all along.

"You won't want to stay," he said. "Your friend's making you breakfast."

"I – would you like to come?" David asked, partly out of ingrained politeness and partly because in everything he'd read since meeting Luke it was considered good policy to offer hospitality to people, especially if they were gods.

Evan laughed. "No," he said. "But see if your friend won't bring me a butty later. It's his fault I'm here, after all."

When David got back to the cottage, Luke was there, frying the sausages with one almost indifferent hand and examining the packaging with the other.

"You know, it says these are dragon sausages," he told Astrid, who was giggling into her cup of tea. "But there's no actual dragon in them."

"They probably don't know where to find them," David offered. Luke grinned, looking at him through his fringe.

"Hunters are so lazy in this modern age," he said, and looked cross-eyed at the sausages until they were cooked just how he liked them.

"What do you want to do today?" Astrid asked them both. "This is lovely, Luke."

"I aim to please," Luke said. "Or displease, as the case may be." He seemed to be enjoying a private joke, and David had decided long ago to leave him to it.

"I don't know," he said. "We could go into Cardiff, I suppose."

"Why don't you drive up to Gloucester?" Luke suggested. He was still smiling and David glanced at him curiously.

"Don't you want to see your friend?" he asked, but carefully. Luke often had very good reasons for not wanting to see his old friends.

"Oh, Evan?" Luke said. "I'll take him a sandwich later. Don't you want to see the Severn Bore?"

"It's not _so_ far," said Astrid doubtfully, which meant that an hour or so later after they'd done boring things like wash up and get dressed they were in the car on the way to Stonebench. Luke was terrible in a car, he got bored and mostly played at winding the window up and down again until Astrid threatened to brain him with a Bee Gees cassette.

"Sorry," said Luke, not looking sorry.

It was only eight o'clock when they got into Stonebench despite Luke's teasing about directions, and Astrid decided unilaterally that the only thing for it was tea from a thermos and a cigarette while they waited. Luke produced a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and he and David sat munching them for a minute before Luke paused.

"Do you hear that?" he asked, tilting his head to one side.

"Do I hear what?" asked David, doing the same, and then he did hear it, the sound of rushing water and the rumble of noise building on itself.

"Hmm," said Luke. "Finish the crisps, I don't want them. I think I might be eating my grandchildren." He thrust the bag at David, who took them gingerly – he didn't want to eat Luke's grandchildren any more than Luke did – and clambered up onto an overhanging tree to get a better look. This was dubiously safe, but Luke seemed unlikely to die from a five foot fall into the Severn. It was mostly clean. People swam in it, after all, so it wasn't likely to eat the flesh off anyone's bones.

"Here it comes!" he said, sounding very pleased. David had only time to gain a quick impression of a blasting wall of water before he felt himself being yanked, and Luke's hand in his. He stumbled forward, his footing suddenly being sure confusing him, and got Astrid's elbow in his ribs for the trouble. He clutched at her and they went down in a heap together, his face smushed into her bony shoulder.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Luke, his voice somewhere above them and highly amused. David blinked, recognising the carpet beneath him. Astrid's mother hated it.

"How – " he began to ask, but of course the answer was always Luke, so he stopped. "Why?" he asked instead, because Luke had gone to so much trouble to get them there.

"Sorry about that," Luke said, but like before he seemed positively cheerful. "It turned out to be a bit bigger than I thought it would be."

Astrid was already picking herself up from the floor and going over to their television set. All she got was static, initially; she had to poke at the aerial a bit before she found the BBC. Peter Woods was on, narrating in lugubrious tones about "flash floods in Gloucester and surrounding areas". She stared at him for a moment and then turned round to glare at Luke. "What's going on?"

Luke scratched his nose and then smiled slightly. "Well, the world is ending."

"Oh," said Astrid faintly, and staggered three steps to sit down firmly on the sofa. "I thought it might be something like that."

"My son has let go his tail," said Luke, in the voice that Evan had used, with words echoing beneath words. "Very soon now he will die, and Thor with him. Would you know yet more?"

David closed his hand, then opened it again. He couldn't think of anything to say.

Astrid said, "I – I'm sorry for your loss."

Luke looked rather startled and then he shrugged slightly. "It has to happen," he said.

"…reports are still coming in of flooding across south Wales and south west England," Peter Woods said. Luke reached out and turned the television off, his face dimly reflected in the coloured glass.

"Why here?" David asked. "Why not – Norway, or, or, Sweden or Denmark – ?"

"It doesn't matter," Astrid said. "It'll be everywhere soon enough, oh, _God_." She broke off and covered her face with one hand. David thought she might be wishing that she'd just stayed in bed this morning. But then they'd both be drowned.

"It's starting here because I'm here," said Luke with the calm arrogance of someone who knew, who had always known, that the end of the world was all about him. "That's it, really."

"What's going to happen?" David asked. It seemed like a good idea to know the worst, but Luke made a face.

"Mostly there'll be earthquakes and storms and things," he said dismissively. "Just about everyone will die."

"You're very calm," Astrid said, shoving her hands into her hair until it stood up like a hedgehog's spines. "Oh, _God_."

"I've had a lot of time to get used to the idea," said Luke, not unreasonably. "You know, Astrid, I think we could all do with a cup of tea."

Astrid blinked, and something in her hindbrain reasserted itself. "Right," she said. "Let's put the kettle on, then."

They filed into the kitchen and waited in silence while the kettle boiled. David squirmed on the hard wooden chair, finally drawing one knee up to his chest and staring at the cupboards that Astrid had been so pleased about last year. He wondered if they'd survive. After what seemed an agony of waiting, Astrid got up to pour the tea. They both watched Luke blow on his, making waves which nearly slopped over the lip of the mug. This seemed to amuse him more than anything else that day.

"You're going to die, too," David said eventually.

"Yep!" said Luke, and grinned. "But not 'til right at the end, so you'd best stick with me."

Astrid found a cigarette and tapped it on the kitchen table. "Will we live, then?" she asked, trying to look as though the answer wasn't especially interesting.

"No," Luke said, reaching over to squeeze her hand and ignoring her sharp intake of breath before she pulled away. "But you'll live longer, if that helps."

"Not really," she said.

"Sorry," he said. "It's the best I can do."

"Why does it have to be _now_?" she burst out, and then shut her mouth tight, pursing her lips against the words that wanted to pour out. David thought of the cupboards again, and of everything else in their house that he and Astrid had spent so much time putting together. The picture frames, those they'd found in the Oxfam shop for nearly nothing that had photos of him and Alan and her and Sigurd (but none of Luke, he realised suddenly, because Luke said he didn't photograph well). The tea table which was the only thing they'd kept from the old house because Astrid had always admired it; that was going to be gone, too. David wondered vaguely if it would be dug up in a thousand years' time and exhibited in some science-fiction museum. The Britannic tribes of the 1970s used it as a status symbol and as a forum in which to conduct diplomacy.

Luke merely shrugged. David thought it was probably because he had released Luke from his bonds, which in a horribly near way made him responsible for the apocalypse. He was trying not to think about it, like not poking at a sore tooth with your tongue. He was still skirting round the edges of this idea when Luke said,

"They would have had to release me at some point, to get it over with. For the rest of them it might as well be now as later. The trouble with living so long is that you get sick of yourself." Luke made a face at his tea leaves, which presumably said something nasty was going to happen to him, and got up to pour himself another cup. "Naglfar should be around somewhere – that's my ship, and why you couldn't have the decency to live near water, I don't know. I might need another lift, Astrid, darling, would you mind? I brought the car from Stonebench, too."

Astrid's face said she did mind, and Luke correspondingly seemed to look younger and sweeter, until it was nearly impossible to connect him with the voice that had been on the telly, or the yelling they'd heard just before he'd yanked them away from the bore, or the crying from next door that they could hear through the thin walls. Luke frowned momentarily, and the crying stopped. Astrid sighed, one of the big gusty ones that you sigh when you've got nothing else to say.

"I suppose if I don't, you'll just steal someone else's," she said, and Luke nodded in acknowledgement of this fair point.

"And," he said, darting over to her side and whispering something that David almost didn't catch, about David's chances and bettering them. He would have protested, but Astrid going with them meant an improvement of her chances, too. And they were going to die anyway…

David suddenly, abruptly, did not want to watch Luke die. But he stood up and helped wash up the cups (Astrid insisted, and made Luke help) and then cleaned the kettle, and then cut the crusts off Astrid's sandwiches for her while Luke found a lunchbox in the cupboard. By the time they got into the car again, David had almost succeeded in not thinking about it. Luke slid into the back seat next to him and touched his arm.

"It's – hmm, all right. It's not going to be all right. Are you all right?" he asked, and then looked faintly annoyed at this failure of English vocabulary.

"No," said David honestly. The fading sunlight was dim on Luke's face; he looked like something, someone unknowable. "The sun – is that you?"

"Not me," said Luke. "Someone else. But look – " he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together for a second and fire flashed in his palm. "Try that." David did, and flinched back when a flame lit up in his hand. "There. We're going to get separated, but as long as I'm alive, that should work."

"Don't distract the driver," said Astrid. "I don't know _what_ you're doing, but don't let it show up in my rearview mirror."

Luke laughed, and told David to close his hand. David did so gingerly, but it turned out to be painless. "I meant it, you know."

"Meant what?" asked David.

"You're my friend," said Luke. "It's a rare commodity these days. I didn't lie about that."

"I never thought you did," said David, and Luke smiled.

"I lie all the time," he said. "But I do like you. You two, in fact," and round the headrest David could see Astrid nod. "It's a left here."

They took it, and drove on into the fading world.


End file.
